Like Oil And Water- Barbara Stanwyck and Clark Gable’s To Please A Lady- A Film Review (1950)

 

 

 

DVD Review

From The Pen Of Zack James

To Please a Lady, starring Barbara Stanwyck, Clark Gable, and a bunch of famous and not so famous race car drivers, 1950

Okay, let’s go by the numbers here, or rather the science and the heck with the numbers, oil and water do not mix. Do not mix for very sound reasons having to do with chemical properties, densities and all that other stuff you learned, or half learned like me, in high school chemistry class. And that is what we have here is this classic black and white 1950 romance film, To Please a Lady.

The oil-well of course hard-nosed, want-to-win-at-any-cost-he-man-1950s-he-man-war hero race car driver Mike Brannan (played by a Clark Gable beginning to get a little rough around the edges but still a worthy movie matinee idol). The water-of course hard-nosed, want-to-get- the- story-at-any-cost syndicated columnist Regina Forbes (played by Barbara Stanwyck last seen dangling a provocative ankle Fred MacMurry’s way in Double Indemnity so don’t mess with her, no way). No way is this combination going to be anything but daggers and twenty paces especially when brash Mike gets Regina’s nose out of joint during an interview in which he dismisses her out of hand. (And in another scene as well in which he slaps her after some silly provocation, something that would rightly cause a stir today with all the cases of domestic violence around but which in the film just acted to make Mike more attractive to Regina.)            

I hope you paid attention to one little word in the first paragraph, that word “romance” because despite all my blathering on about oil and water not mixing there is no way in a 1950s Hollywood film that hunk Gable and fetching Stanwyck are not going to wind up under the satin sheets (even if not shown on film like they would nowadays). So the pair has to go through a dance before they finally join up. That dance included Regina getting Mike barred from anything to do with race cars except some back road circus thrill-a-minute gig. But Mike didn’t win his tough guy on the track reputation (or that chest full of medals in some muddy European fields) by rolling over and so he worked his way back up to the Indy cars. Of course he can’t win at Indy, can’t win the real race because there is no Mike Brannan listed as winning that trophy any year. But he does win Regina as she had begun to follow his road back as he lifted himself from the cheap streets. They have their ups and downs like every couple but in the end the audience gets to feel good that at least in the movies oil and water do mix-I wish I knew the formula for it though.